The bipartisan Build America Caucus, which helped spearhead passage of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing law, on Monday released the Build More Agenda, a package of more than 60 policy proposals addressing housing and other topics, according to an Oct. 5 press release.
Reps. Josh Harder (D-Calif.) and Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) are leading the effort in response “to the dysfunction that has kept us from building the things that are integral to American life,” per the release. Founded in 2025, the Build America Caucus aims to “advance federal pro-growth policies and make it easier to build,” according to its website.
The goal of these new proposals is to "kickstart the conversation of what comes next after ROAD,” Harder told Multifamily Dive.
“We don't want to rest on our laurels, and we've proven that there's a bipartisan coalition of folks that want to do more pro-housing legislation,” Harder said. “This is a set of ideas that get people excited and thinking about what can come next, and our hope is to flesh it out over the next couple of months and work on it next Congress.”
Besides pushing for implementation of ROAD, the caucus is focused on measures that the law didn’t comprehensively address, such as development financing, restrictive zoning, building codes and streamlining federal housing systems, according to Harder. Financing is a focus “because there wasn't a whole lot of that in the bill,” he said.
“We know that as interest rates have continued to go up, that projects can’t move forward without reliable and affordable financing,” Harder said. “It’s very clear that high [interest] rates are hurting housing starts…. and I think we have a real opportunity to fix that.”
To that end, the group wants to establish a federal revolving loan fund for housing, which Harder thinks can be done at “basically no cost to the federal government.”
“By putting in some initial dollars, doing loans to housing projects at below-market-rate interest, and then making sure that those loans are repaid and creating that revolving fund, I think that's going to be a really important vehicle towards filling some of the financing gaps for the construction of more housing,” Harder said.
The group also wants to speed up multifamily lending by modernizing HUD systems and underwriting processes. Specifically, it wants to streamline the Federal Housing Agency’s financing process for infill housing.
“Those FHA loans can take a year to close, as opposed to two or three months for conventional financing,” Harder said. “HUD takes a long time to move this process; they have outdated technology, and so one of the things we're working on is trying to fix the FHA process.”
More housing construction ahead?
Other proposals aim to mitigate the cost of construction, which “has just gone up and up and up,” according to Harder. “It's gotten more and more expensive to actually build a project, and so a lot of what we're trying to do is trying to make it cheaper to actually put a shovel in the dirt,” Harder said.
One measure Harder thinks could be particularly impactful is “right to build zones” for multifamily housing. Jurisdictions that opt in will receive more federal support in exchange for changing their zoning to allow housing to be built by-right, so long as a project meets certain criteria.
If passed, the measure “would dramatically accelerate the rate of housing construction across the country,” Harder said. “I think you can create a race-to-the-top type of incentive with that.”
Similarly, the group wants to facilitate transit-oriented development. Local governments shouldn’t make it harder for people to live near taxpayer-funded train stations or bus lines, according to the caucus. But restrictive zoning limits the amount and type of housing that can be built near transit stops and prevents people from living close enough to maximize their use.
“Why should the federal government be spending billions of dollars building a new highway, a new bridge, a new transit line when the communities that are located around that don't want to build the housing? That doesn't make any sense,” Harder said.
Complex and varied building codes is another area the group seeks to standardize in order to streamline housing development. National code models are updated every three years, but many communities don’t have the resources to regularly evaluate and adopt them, leaving builders with a patchwork of regulations across jurisdictions. That can “raise costs overall by making it harder to build at scale,” according to the caucus.
Harder thinks that this can positively impact apartment construction “because those building codes are a lot more complicated for multifamily,” he said.
Other measures include targeted tax relief for residential construction, allowing housing to be built on government property and reforming some parts of the Buy America law, which mandates that certain projects receiving federal financial assistance use domestically produced building materials.
Another proposal would streamline regulations around transporting mass timber, a material used in multifamily housing. That “may sound niche, but it's a big deal when you're moving timber from one state to another, and there's just a real hodgepodge of rules around that,” Harder said.
The Build More Agenda also covers other topics like healthcare, infrastructure and transportation, power, scientific research, childcare and government capacity.
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